Embedding capacity, but few consider keeping or improving visual image quality. A new RDH method with contrast enhancement (RDH-CE) is, by pair-wisely expanding the histogram to the lower end to upper end. RDH-CE is especially valuable in exploiting the details of poorly illustrated images for which the visibility of image details is more important than just keeping PSNR high. However, obvious visual image distortion appears when embedding level gets high, and embedding capacity is relatively low when embedding level is small. In this paper, Wu et al.'s work is improved from four perspectives, namely image contrast enhancement, visual distortion reduction, encryption/decryption of image, and embedding capacity increment. The image contrast is improved by making the histogram shifting process adaptive to the histogram distribution characteristics, the image visual distortion is reduced by cutting off half the modification range of pixels induced in histogram pre-shifting, and the embedding capacity is increased by exploiting the pixel value ordering technique at the early stage of data embedment. A simulation result proves that the proposed work is effective in improving image contrast, reducing visual image distortion, and increasing embedding capacity. The proposed system obtained a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of about 1–2 dB greater than the original image.